This is a story you are all free to read... or ignore. Near the end it becomes clear how it relates to clutter, because THIS is how MY porch gets put to bed for the winter.


NINJA LUKE, PENNSYLTUCKY MAN

Over the years we've lived here (since '94), the original landlady's vision has been fulfilled over and over again, and it typifies life here in Pennsyltucky (their name, not mine).

In '94 Hardi was Called here. We needed housing, and on the quick-- sight unseen. This house was coming open for rent around the time we needed it. I called the owner, with all my tenant's-rights/advocacy experience in hand. We discussed what we needed and what they could offer. (I thought it was a business transacation. I was wrong.)

"OK, then, we just need to sign the lease, " I said. "Can you mail it to us here in Chicagoland?"

She laughed an old-lady-wisdom laugh. "Honey, we do things here on a handshake. You come on ahead. I expect the people in it now will be gone in time." (They weren't, so Hardi threw a mattress on the floor in an empty room, and bunked with them for the 2 weeks it took their new house to be completed.)

We really enjoyed Iris and Walter. (I wrote about Walter once, here, in "Them Ducks.") Iris is in fulltime care now, I think, and it's her farmer-son Bruce (our age) who wears the landowner hat. Bruce succeeded Walter as Farmer.

Over the years we've helped show Bruce's kids some of the facts of adult life, because he did the same for us. My son Dave still thinks of Bruce as one of his dads.

Bruce and Peggy have four strapping young men, now, at various ages of development. This year it's young Luke (HS) who they send down when we need help in a hurry. (Hardi helps them in a hurry now that our teens flew the coop). It's a reciprocal relationship very common here.

Why is Luke "Ninja Luke"?

Over the summer I urgently needed an item from the house while we were on vacay, camping. Luke had been designated "housewatcher" for this year (we had another petcare helper, tho usually that has been the chore of one of these young men). So Luke, cellphone in hand, went on a hunt in my crazy and filthy house to locate the item.

I guided him thru the maze of doors that divide off this house in sections. (When the property was in active farm use it made sense. Now I use it to divide doggehs.) It took awhile, and many turns, to get to the room I thought held the treasure.

I said, "I'm sorry the house is such a mess." He said, "No-- it's just a little like being a spy. I feel like a Ninja!" We both laughed. "Ninja Luke it is!"

(And he's HUGE-- in a dark alley he'd be so scary, because the good-hearted grin would be invisible.)

The item was found and duly shipped after his excellent research on how to send mail to a PA campground site-- we had no idea how, and that's another story!-- but a parishioner works for the parks so Luke just called him up.

A thank-you gift (per older brother Mark's recent, helpful guidance) went to the family. It was a "fat" note, get it?


The next time I needed help I called Luke's cell. "Are there any Ninjas around?" I asked. "As a matter of fact I have an hour later today," he said, "if that is when you could use a hand." At the agreed time he appeared and blew thru what would have been a painful 6 hours for me. That day he learned how to do a number of things. "Call me any time, I'm your Ninja;" he said, and frowned. "But don't you worry about money--= we really do have everything we need."


This is Iris' youngest grandson, the last of four who have been continuing her Country Living Curriculum. Each of them have been able to boss me like a man does here, and still respect me more than any man I have ever known elsewhere. You can't help but learn. They make me a Better Woman, and can always get around my stubborn insistence that while I understand they "can't be paid," I can't have help that ISN't "paid." But I get around them right back. (They teach me how.)

Ninja Luke just left, having come on the hop to manhandle a dresser I thought I could unload-- and probably could have, if it hadn't been Saturday with tonight's service to save my back for. It was just like Luke. "Hi, it's Mrs. H," I said. "Hi," he said, "How are you?" "Well, I thought I was doing OK till I ran into a dresser it turns out I can't unload today." "Can I come right over?" he said. "Sure, I'll throw some clothes on." "OK," he said, and he gave me ten minutes and then showed up.

"How should I do this?" he asked, because at home, his ma can't get him to help like this. (We couldn't get our boys to cooperate either, like other adults could.) So since I do not call very often, Luke has not had much experience handling non-farm or non-athletic heavy things. "Well, you grab here and tilt here and walk it across the porch," I said, and gave the now-coming-out-of-my-van dresser a good tug where I'd taken out a drawer to make a grab-point. "Or I can push it out to you from the other end." "Oh, OK, I see, I think I can get it." And out it came, and across the porch it walked, and he learned how to re-attach legs... and put in drawers... and put furniture cups between the legs and the bluestone-flagged porch floor.... And I gave him a message for Mark who made a surprise visit home this weekend. (We have a contact for Mark, in the parish.)

And THAT is how I caught the flow on what is the only warm and sunny day we have had, or may have, for quite some time.

Up on the hill behind, in Bruce's pasture, the beef cattle are trying to graze. They're running off hanging weight while gas drillers run machinery that I SWAR sounds just like a freight train taking all day to go by.

By the end of October, an enormous flamethrower will be sending "War of the Worlds" klieg-lights up into the reflective clouds to terrify us all. Again. And my drinking water will be even MORE fracked up, but then I'm ahead of the game-- I already cleared the new winter drinking-water counter in the laundry room rebuilt after the 2000 fire blew THAT out.

One of the mutual appreciations between us and the "landlord" is the fact that we stayed in the house, post-fire, and paid rent while it was unfit to live in, and they had the lawsuit against us thrown out that they had not known their insurance company had begun-- oh my, Iris was SO MAD the day her lawyer told her about THAT after the year of depositions we endured! "Why didn't you TELL me this was gong on?!?!?!" she said when she called us, from his office. "We thought you knew," we said, "and just tried not to worry."

Building codes here BTW are very funny-- sitting in the lawyer's office doing a deposition about "our" "poor" fire safety practices-- with the ins. lawyers-- while staring at the lawyer's VERY unsafely-installed AC. Well, the ins. lawyers weren't "from here." We laughed with the local lawywer (a friend) about that the next time we saw him.


Some people understand that THESE are the people I choose to learn from, when it comes to life HERE, in the hills.

~Susan